Facebook and Its Facebook Nation
December 14, 2010
I found the “World Map of Social Networks Shows Facebook’s Ever Increasing Dominance” startling. I am not a Facebook denizen. If you poke around, you can locate a Beyond Search Facebook page which a software robot maintains. But the map is an eye opener. I suppose this is what was behind Microsoft’s alleged buy out offer for Facebook a couple of years ago. There’s not much to say about a map, but there are several data tables and these are revelatory. Facebook is number one in a selected list of nine countries. Russia is Facebook resistant which is no big surprise. Google may want to get on its scooter to get in this Facebook game. If the data in the tables are accurate, LinkedIn might be a potential target for Google or Microsoft.
Stephen E Arnold, December 14, 2010
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Google and Microsoft: Two So Far Unsuccessful Attempts to Buy into Social Media
December 12, 2010
I read a short news item on Neowin.com. The article–“Microsoft Tried to Acquire Facebook for $15 Billion”—reports that Facebook was the object of a $15 billion buyout attempt. Microsoft was not able to get the entire company and apparently settled for a stake in the social universe for 650 million members. The reason for the big number is partially explained in this snippet:
What the future holds for Facebook is unknown as the site contains so much personal information, its literally a treasure chest full of information to marketers. But, as the technology world goes, its not about the products that currently exists that will challenge Facebook, its the new startup that no one has heard of yet that may eventually lead to Facebook’s demise.
Advertising.
Now recall that Google tried and may still be trying to buy Groupon, a local ad service. Daily Finance reported in “Why Groupon Said No to Google”:
The answer, it seems, is antitrust concerns. Groupon’s top brass thought Google’s offer could have drawn more scrutiny from regulators than any other deal the Internet behemoth has ever done, a source told Business Insider.
That sounds like a valid reason. We may never know, of course, exactly why the deal did not work on. Google is a smart operator, so more machinations may be underway, just out of sight.
These two failed deals raised a thought.
Neither Google nor Microsoft have been able to develop online information winners. Google has its search and ad business. That’s a home run, but it is a home run that is anchored in an idea from GoTo.com many years ago. Microsoft is in the search and ad game as well. However, Microsoft’s climb to its present level of success was via a tie up with Yahoo. Google has not cracked the social media ecosystem the way it shattered search. Microsoft, to its credit has a stake in Facebook, but it has not been unable to roll out its own hat trick performance in the social space.
These points beg this question: “Why has neither Google nor Microsoft been able to duplicate or approximate the success of Facebook and Groupon?”
Google and Microsoft are definitely in the position to spend billions for companies that are perceived to have a money factory inside their office space. Image source: http://nahright.com/news/2009/10/31/game-big-money-prod-cool-dre-clean-mastered/
My view is that Google and Microsoft are moving in a way that makes both companies increasingly similar. The approach generates billions in revenues, but it also seems to make home grown, organic social media innovation difficult.
What other limitations with the management methods in these two companies create? Right now the follow hypotheses are in the forefront of my mind:
- Microsoft forced IBM to adapt to its disruptive presence by becoming a services company
- Microsoft is now acting a bit like the “old” IBM
- Google is becoming more like Microsoft
- Facebook and Groupon seem to be moving in ways that parallel the disruptive actions of Google and Microsoft
- Amazon has shifted from vendor of fungible books to a giant services company that is similar to Wal*Mart.
Online has changed. With that change, search has fragmented and become plumbing. The action has shifted from the complexities of information retrieval to a utility that “snaps in” to the various service arrays companies are offering consumers.
No wonder the hapless enterprise search procurement teams are dumb founded about what vendor to tap for search technology. Isn’t it easier to ask one’s friends or just use a coupon offer than chops a price down to an attractive offer?
I think 2011 may be an interesting exercise in acquisitions, successful and unsuccessful.
Stephen E Arnold, December 12, 2010
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From Search to Facebook, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah
December 6, 2010
From the Beyond Search really important behavior desk:
With the Beatles catalog finally released on iTunes after years of negotiations, it’s interesting to note that people do not seem to be turning primarily to Google to find their favorite tunes. “Apple iTunes Beatles Success Driven by Facebook Not Search” reports on British Internet traffic the day the Beatles catalog was released. The article states: “On the day the Beatles content came to iTunes, 26.32 percent of total Apple traffic came from social networks compared to just 16.59 percent two days previously. Specifically, Apple saw a huge spike in traffic coming from Facebook. On the day that the Beatles content was available to download from iTunes, 1 in every 200 visits that left Facebook went directly to Apple.”
Wowza.
These stats focus only on the UK, but since FB is so popular in the U.S. my guess would be that the phenomenon was the same on this side of the pond as well. What does this mean for Google? Maybe it will make sure the Google social networking platform debuts faster than the Beatles catalog. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hope you understand.
Alice Wasielewski, December 6, 2010
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Facebook, the Pain of Change, and the Web
December 3, 2010
I have been thinking about the sky-is-falling message in Tim Berners-Lee analysis of Facebook. Widely reported, the “inventor of the Web” sees Facebook as a flea carrying bubonic evil in the fur of entrepreneurs. In short, Facebook represents a shift from the Wild Web Web to a walled garden with security cameras and listening devices.
You can get a breezy run down of the anti-change message in the current Scientific American essay.
I can visualize a scene around the campfire in what would become Kansas. The conversationalists don’t have Facebook pages but both work for an outfit paying them to ride a bunch of horses in serial like Christmas tree lights from one cow town to another.
Cowboy 1: What’cha think of that tel-ee-graph thing?
Cowboy 2: I think it’s-a goin’ to be less personal than us’ns takin’ the mail to folks we know.
Cowboy 1: Yep, I think it is the end of the mail delivery as we know it.
Cowboy 2: I would like to shoot the varmints that want to ruin a perfectly good way to communicate.
I think I could have heard a grousing clay tablet expert yammer about papyrus. The print dudes are struggling with twisted knickers over digital today.
What’s a-goin’ on today, partner?
First, the good old Web is already gone. Email is collateral damage. The mantra of Gordon Gekko has enchanted enough people to make information the equivalent of manipulated messages. So, the Web is dead and it is not coming back. Ever.
Second, the pace of change is accelerating. The reason is money, not what users need or think each needs. Greed is good and greed is transformative.
Third, walled gardens solve a lot of problems. Customers are chained to specific vendors. Captivity is what makes accountants happy. Captive customers behave in a predictable way and for budgeting purposes, that predictability is the chief good.
One can take different sides of the argument. That diversity is what passes for critical thinking today. Before grousing about Facebook, I think it is useful to look at the data. Facebook has stickiness, 650 million users, and a growing arsenal of features. Why go anywhere else?
Research has been changed. I like the word “devolve”. The Web is on a long hill with a street named decline. Remember the telephone and its early supporters’ idea that it would be used to disseminate important news. The phone today is the stuff that makes 12 years old have goose bumps. Change. Already accomplished.
Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, December 3, 2010
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What’s going on?
PolySpot Enhances Shiseido
November 30, 2010
Even a cosmetic company needs a makeover once in awhile. IndiceRH.net discusses Shiseido International France’s newest search providers. The original IndiceRH write up has gone dark but you can read “Jalios et PolySpot formalisent et capitalisent les connaissances chez Shiseido International” on the PolySpot Web site.
Shiseido wants to beautify its information access with technology from PolySpot and Jalios (a vendor of content management solutions). The project’s main goals are to formalize the information gathering process, share knowledge with new employees, and facilitate the creation/use of good business practices. These goals are carried out with a search engine in the PolySpot Enterprise Search Tool and use the Jalios JCMS editor to sieve through the information. Jalios JCMS is akin to SharePoint with PolySpot augmenting the program with its searching capabilities and tweaked to reflect Shiseido International France’s needs. The write up asserts:
Today, this integration is completely transparent to users. They access the search engine PolySpot Enterprise Search directly from their work environment Jalios and recover their research results directly into their usual interface with full respect for rights of access.
Shiseido International France’s technology facelift was successful and they hope to continue improvements with regular injections of new content and retrieval methods.
Whitney Grace, November 30, 2010
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Facebook Flexes its Facial Muscles
November 27, 2010
“Facebook Comprises Nearly 25% of Page Views in the US” reports Read Write Web, a rather shocking figure. The article states: “According to Hitwise stats, for the week ending November 13, 24.27 percent of page views were to Facebook, almost four times the volume of the site ranked number two – YouTube, with “only” 6.93 percent of all page views. Even YouTube plus Google’s search combined only comprise around 12 percent of page views.” Of course, counting page views is not quite the same as counting unique visitors and mobile views weren’t counted at all. Still, this is one more piece of evidence that Facebook continues to dominate the web, with no end in sight.
Alice Wasielewski, November 27, 2010
Facebook: Dating Effloresces
November 18, 2010
The Facebook announcement triggered a flood of posts, punditry, and pandering. I quite liked “Locked in Paradigms.” Most of the other posts I did not like so much. Venture Chronicles struck me as coming closer to the Facebook email-instant messaging-kitchen sink communications service. The write up said:
It’s easy to see why Facebook is keeping Google executive up at night… they are innovating at the edge and at the core simultaneously, have complete control over users social graphs while Google has to piece it together, and have a distribution capability that is only rivaled by Google. Most significantly, Facebook doesn’t seem restrained by the way that common applications, like messaging, have always worked and their ability to lever into 3rd party applications gives them an enormous advantage just at the moment.
Facebook is riding a wave and generating buzz. Google lost the wave and people turned down the buzz. Dating has effloresced at Facebook. Membership versus generic services seems to have the magic. How long will Facebook’s momentum persist? Google’s run up was quick. Facebook’s may be quicker. Microsoft’s trajectory suggests that we are talking years. But the Facebook social Swiss Army knife will probably gut AOL and Yahoo. Collateral damage in my opinion. Oh, and if you want to know why some folks wax enthusiastic over Facebook, read this article. No comment about this percentage for the Math Club.
Stephen E Arnold, November 18, 2010
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Can You Digg It?
November 17, 2010
Automated systems with user generated content operate by rules different from those of traditional newspapers and magazines. Crowds can become mobs. Publishers prefer more genteel behaviors.
Digg, once your typical social information service, has now taken a vital step to become a market for socialization and newsgathering.
The site recently added a breaking news module and community team to aggregate should-be front page stories in efforts to become a source of news, says “Digg Adds Editors to Break News Faster.”
In the past, stories that garnered the most votes from users were then posted as front page articles, often taking a few hours for breaking news to become appropriate headlines. In today’s terms of real-time breaking news, this lengthy process made Digg a less than ideal destination for news junkies.
But with the addition of a new editorial layer, breaking news will now be posted in a more timely fashion for the typical online news seekers.
As the article says, the editors’ decisions “won’t directly affect the content that appears on the front page, but their recommendations will surely influence the stories that the Digg community will vote for.”
Hmm… sounds awfully familiar to Slashdot.
We think Digg is cool but we’d like to see something different and more innovated. Something that doesn’t resemble the recent past. Something…. What’s the word? Oh yeah, “new”. With some erratic online performance and stories that are not on the cutting edge, can you dig the service?
Leah Moody November 17, 2010
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Salesforce and Social
November 16, 2010
I learned a couple of months ago that Salesforce.com is adding collaborative features to its cloud services for businesses and professionals. The shift is logical. The person who alerted me to this social initiative suggested that Salesforce wanted to become the Facebook for business professionals. I am not sure I can see that playing out in the present line up of Salesforce services. But I can see how collaborative and social tools make sense for a group of professionals working for the same organization or working on on a joint project. IBM has the same idea.
When IBM released Cognos 10, they integrated Lotus Connections into their business intelligence solution to increase sharing and collaboration between users. Now Salesforce is launching a solution to compete with Lotus Connections. According to “Salesforce.com’s Chatter, Mobile Knowledge Management and Collaboration” in the new Chatter “the status of important projects and deals are automatically pushed to you” allowing users to stay in the loop. This new solution sounds promising, but can Salesforce hold out against IBM? In our opinion, the “I” in IBM doesn’t stand for innovation. IBM may have to consider acquiring or partnering with Salesforce in order to augment their current offerings and maximize their solutions for today’s needs.
Will Salesforce and IBM collide? Will IBM acquire Salesforce? Google seems to have let its love affair with Salesforce lie fallow. War or peace? We need a Tolstoy to sort out the high stakes games being played out today.
Laura Amos, November 16, 2010
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Mid Tier Consulting Firm Makes Some Wild Email Claims
November 16, 2010
I know it is a drag having to be a thought leader able to sell work. But with each passing month, I see wilder and wilder prognostications about the future. I am waiting for the Patriots Steelers game to begin and thinking about our new Intel Stream podcast, which complements our experimental IntelTrax Web log. Neither of these trial services does much speculation. We focus on what’s going on now.
A case in point is the lousy state of snail mail and email. I get quite a bit of both types, and frankly most of what I receive is crazy junk, wacky missives from art history majors who landed a job at dad’s public relations firm, or a handful of people who think I will revert back to my 25 year old, fun loving, 18 hour a day self.
I stumbled across this write up by tapping links in my iPad: “Social-Networking Services to Replace E-mail as Primary Vehicle for Interpersonal Communications for 20% of Business Users by 2014, says Gartner.” Gartner is one of the mid tier consulting firms that explains the world in unusual ways. The firm relies on a knock off or clone of the old dog-star-cash cow-question mark matrix. When I worked at Booz, Allen, I recall some of the partners’ envy of this nifty way to communicate with often-beleaguered executives at client firms.
A blue suit, white shirt, and discreet tie do not a Bain, BCG, Booz, Allen, or McKinsey consultant make. Underneath the costume — just everyday pretenders. Trick or treat is fun for kids, but maybe not so much fun for those paying for ill considered advice and prognostications built on partial or flawed data, assumptions and facts.
The company, it seems to me, appears to be increasing its handicapping of certain technologies and business trends. A good example is the idea that social networking will “replace” email. Hold on, Harpo. I still get a printed Yellow Pages, a newspaper on paper, and snail mail. New methods of communication complement other methods. In 48 months, my hunch is that messaging will follow the path of Twitter, Facebook, and RockMelt (the social browser built on Chrome). Even the young workers who are lucky enough to get jobs will be using a range of communication methods. Among them will be embedded social communication techniques, but the “replace” is rather stark and unsupported. As a wild and crazy statement, I think it ranks right up there with Google’s clever “move if you don’t like Street View” quip.
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